Free In Red by Magdalena Tulli Page A

headache, linen that turned into cotton wool after a single washing.
    â€œWhat did they expect?” Felek would guffaw, winking at Adaś and poking him with a pencil to make him laugh along. “I mean, the riffraff say they want cheap goods, and either way they can’t afford expensive things.”
    Felek Chmura’s debtors were easy to spot by their pallor, their shallow breathing, their hair clumped with cold sweat. Before long all of Strobbel’s workers were suffering from headaches and stomachaches.

    â€œGet moving, my machines are running idle!” Slotzki would say in exasperation as he strode across the shop floor. “All you know how to do is eat and drink, you don’t give a damn about working.”
    Each evening he would frown at the bins filled with defective items. Every day for a quarter of an hour or even more the factory operated to the detriment of the firm of Strobbel & Slotzki, the machinery wasted electricity and porcelain clay, the fire blazed unnecessarily in the ovens, the glaze was stirred needlessly in the vats. Slotzki came to realize beyond the shadow of a doubt that as Chmura made money hand over fist from the sale of his stupendously cheap goods, he was taking part of his costs from Slotzki’s own pocket. At this time the factory was expanding, taking on more and more employees, and so losses were rapidly multiplied. Unable to rid himself of Chmura once and for all, Slotzki tried other ways to stop himself from being robbed. He began moving the hands of the factory clock back fifteen minutes during the day, then at night moving them forward by the same amount. He was searching for a truer measure of a day’s work, for which he paid what was due, to the penny.
    Chmura took a pencil and, scrawling clumsy figures, multiplied the pennies that fifteen minutes of work was worth by the ever-increasing number of workers employed at Strobbel’s. In this way he calculated how much cash the porcelain factory was taking from him with the trick involving the clocks. Because all the wages paid were owed to him, a year in advance. Meanwhile
Slotzki & Strobbel’s profits were being deposited in inaccessible foreign bank accounts. In the wee hours of the morning Chmura was tormented by anxiety. He would ring the handbell to summon a sleepy Adaś Rączka and explain to him that actual money was oozing from Stitchings in the form of the porcelain dispatched by Slotzki all over the world in crates packed with sawdust. Via the railroad station. And via the port that led its own existence – an existence that even gave rise to a store selling English tea of the highest quality.
    â€œBut does anyone ever buy anything there? Only the clerks from the shipping companies, and they don’t belong to Stitchings. Neither does the port, or the railroad,” Adaś consoled him sleepily. “Stitchings has been divided up very precisely, sir: Slotzki took the hands, and you have the stomachs. There may not even be any actual money. In your place I’d be sleeping peacefully.” And he’d barely finished talking when he was already sound asleep, standing up, the back of his head resting against the wall.
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    SLOTZKI SINCERELY WISHED BANKRUPTCY ON FELEK WHEN THE latter took over the sewing shops that had continued to operate as before under the company of Loom & Son, yet which were less and less profitable now that the lucrative war contracts had come to an end.
    â€œYou’re going to trip up with those sewing shops,” he would
mutter over cards as he threw his aces on the table and gathered the pot.
    But Felek’s faith was unshakeable.
    â€œThe right card will always turn up eventually,” he would say when he lost for too long. And he would double the ante. The right card always did turn up, sooner or later.
    The shelves of the sewing shop warehouses were piled to the ceiling with reels of musty thread for which the war had